[Gllug] A ripple from the stone on my pond

Mike Brodbelt mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk
Thu May 13 23:45:35 UTC 2004


On Thu, 2004-05-13 at 16:56, Leslie Till wrote:

> In direct contravention of the recent vote by the European Parliament to
> curtail Software Patents, the Irish Presidency of the European Union has
> surreptitiously reinstated unlimited software patent language into the
> text of a statement to be adopted by the European Council of Ministers
> on Monday May, 17th, without further debate!

This situation is pretty miserable, but the above is disingenuous.

What's happened is that a bill was put before the EU parliament for its
first reading at the end of last year. Lobbying from FFII, and a
concerted attempt to educate MEPs resulted in the EU parliament passing
amendments to this bill, which effectively outlawed pure software
patents. Now, the interests that put the bill forward weren't happy
anout this, as the EPO and UKPO have been naughty, and have been
granting software patents under existing laws, even though they're not
supposed to. The bill was aimed to retro-actively legalise these, under
the guise of "harmonising" EU patent legislation. The amendments passed
would have forced some 20,000 issued patents to be voided (rightfully
so, IMO).

A working group has re-written the bill, removing the amendments voted
on by the parliament, and making it worse than it was to begin with.
This new bill, that effectively allows unlimited software patents will
no go to the council of ministers, who will vote on it next week. This
appears to be a much smaller and less representative group than the EU
parliament. Whatever they pass will go back to the EU parliament for a
second reading in due course. At that reading, the parliament can reject
it, but to do this requires an *overall* majority among MEPs, even those
*not* present, so it has little chance of being overturned at this
stage.

It won't go through next week "without further debate", but there may
well be no further effective debate. Certainly, it appears interests
pushing for unlimited patentability are managing to subvert the process
behind closed doors, and the Council of Ministers appears unanswerable
to the EU electorate in this regard. It also appears that the EU will be
getting software patents as a result of this, despite a clear concensus
against them in the EU parliament, a situation which is pretty
disgusting, and makes a mockery of EU process.

I think this debate speaks volumes about the EU - I have been trying to
be optimistic about Europe, on the basis that they can't be worse than
our lot, but this shows that there seems to be a lack of basic democracy
in the system, which is probably an unfixable problem. At this point I'm
starting to think that we'd be best off just getting out entirely, but
if it had all been left up to the UKPO in this instance, I'm sure we
wouldn't have even had this much debate.

Mike.

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